In Suspense

CNN:
The public will have to wait a little longer to read Paul Manafort’s sentencing memo from special counsel Robert Mueller.
The critical filing had a midnight Friday deadline set by the federal court, but the report was not publicly released.
It is possible prosecutors have sent the document to Judge Amy Berman Jackson under seal with proposed redactions. It is up to Jackson to determine what happens next.

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30 thoughts on “In Suspense”

  1. jace, please forgive my presumptive publication.   hope you didn’t stay up all night past your bedtime awaiting the non-announcement on Mueller’s Manafort filing.   perhaps the good judge will release it when his lawyers file on Monday.   ’til then, we are in suspense.

  2. Bill recaps the top stories of the week, including President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” in order to built a border wall.

  3. nytimes:  Cohen Gave Prosecutors New Information on the Trump Family Business

    Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, met last month with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, offering information about possible irregularities within the president’s family business and about a donor to the inaugural committee, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Mr. Cohen, who worked at the Trump Organization for a decade, spoke with the prosecutors about insurance claims the company had filed over the years, said the people, who did not elaborate on the nature of the possible irregularities.

    While it was not clear whether the prosecutors found Mr. Cohen’s information credible and whether they intended to pursue it, the meeting suggests that they are interested in broader aspects of the Trump Organization, beyond their investigation into the company’s role in the hush money payments made before the 2016 election to women claiming to have had affairs with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty last summer to arranging those payments.

    The prosecutors also questioned Mr. Cohen about a donor to the president’s inaugural committee, Imaad Zuberi, a California venture capitalist and political fund-raiser, according to the people familiar with the matter, who were not authorized to discuss the confidential meeting. Around the time that Mr. Zuberi contributed $900,000 to the committee, he also tried to hire Mr. Cohen as a consultant and wrote him a substantial check, one of the people said.

    Although Mr. Cohen did not go through with the arrangement, he was building a consulting business at the time with clients who sought to understand and have access to the Trump administration.

    A spokesman for Mr. Zuberi, Steve Rabinowitz, confirmed the check on Friday, saying it was for $100,000 and never cashed. Mr. Zuberi, the only person directly referenced in a recent subpoena the prosecutors sent the inaugural committee, had previously denied having any dealings with Mr. Cohen beyond a few conversations.

    There was no indication that Mr. Cohen, who is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence in May, implicated Mr. Trump in the possible irregularities discussed during the meeting last month. If prosecutors concluded that Mr. Cohen’s information was truthful and valuable, they could ask the judge who sentenced him to reduce his prison term.

    [continues]

  4. From the previous thread: Farm work is terrible.  Roofing is possibly the worst job one could get.  Factory work eats your soul.  Walking around an air-conditioned warehouse putting stuff in boxes? Please.

    Bink: If that were only true of all Amazon warehouses. The conditions in one of northeast PA’s warehouses are brutal in summer due to lack of/inadequate air conditioning. The stupid township dispatches ambulances to the Amazon facility to be on standby for heat stroke victims, including pregnant women. That’s one of the many reasons that I avoid Amazon unless I cannot buy it locally or find another online vendor. I’m even willing to pay a tad more to a company other than Amazon. Amazon is not much better in terms of paying a living wage and benefits.

  5. Everyone keeps hoping  mueller will find that stick to beat Trump with, ha, don’t count on it. I suspect you all are going to be very disappointed with the final report.

    Jack

  6. Bink spot on observation about AOC yesterday. I was going to make a comment but you did so much better.

    One observation about AOC don’t get between her and a microphone. It’s not safe. She is the Al Sharpton for the millennial generation.

    Jack

  9. Pat

    yep, and no stick.  only small fry that Trump can ignore. Most of the provable crimes are ones that Trump can’t be charged with until he is out of office.  With the Republicns either bought off, too scared or avid supporters Trump is with us until 2021 or beyond if the Democrats can’t get a lid on AOC and the socialist left.

    Jack

  10. Working conditions. I’ve worked on some construction sites before I went in the Army that were incredibly uncomfortably, unhealthily, dangerously bad. Work days were a solid eight hours plus a half-a-day on Saturday. Don’t ask for overtime. It became boom-time for labor unions. We had it good compared with my grandfather’s peers. For them it was twelve hours a day. six days a week. Plus travel time–trolley car if they were lucky. My grandmother rode a horse to her one-room school house. She and grandpa were lucky; he graduated college in 1901, she in 1902. My father was born in 1903. He was lucky, too. Too young for WW-1 and too old for WW-2. Those were the good olde days.

  11. I’d like to know what is going on between Kamala Harris and her father.  He attacked her publicly for saying of course she smokes pot — I am Jamaican!  Her father is and he is a professor at Stanford and he attacked for using the cliche.  I think he could have called her and mentioned it.

  12. The weather is cool and raining.  The record setting rainfall pattern from 2018 is continuing in 2019.  Blah.
     

    I really do not like google machine.  Entering the ingredients I have on hand to make into a dinner results in ten dog food recipes.  At least there were no recipes for rat food.
     

    One day last week one of the talking heads suggested that SFB staff were leaking the stuff about the Mueller investigation wrapping up next week.  Something about SFB going nutso and by making him think the investigation is ending.  Even if it did the other federal districts have their cases and the states have their cases.  The heart attack in action is going to end up in prison, federal or state.

  13. cbs news:

    Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson has allowed special counsel Robert Mueller to file a sentencing memo on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under seal in federal court in D.C.

     

     

    A redacted version of the memo will be available online. Friday had been the deadline for the filing on Manafort’s punishment, although that process appears to have been slowed by the redaction process.

    The sentencing recommendation comes as the 69-year-old Manafort, who led Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for several months, is already facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison in a separate case.

    The former Trump campaign chairman was originally to be tried in two different cases, one in Virginia and one in the District. He was tried in Virginia, but made a plea deal to avoid the second trial. In the District of Columbia, Manafort was charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., failing to register as a foreign agent, money laundering, witness tampering and making false statements.

    [continues]

  14. look! up in the sky! it’s a bird. it’s a plane! no, it’s a Kalashnikov kamikaze drone!!!

    wapo:

    ABU DHABI — The Russian company that gave the world the iconic AK-47 assault rifle has unveiled a suicide drone that may similarly revolutionize war by making sophisticated drone warfare technology widely and cheaply available.

     

    The Kalashnikov Group put a model of its miniature exploding drone on display this week at a major defense exhibition in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where the world’s arms companies gather every two years to show off and market their latest wares.

     

    The tiny item was dwarfed by the tanks, armored vehicles and fighter jets that were also on display. But it has as much potential to change the face of war as its older cousin, the AK-47, widely referred to simply as the Kalashnikov.

    […]

    The Kalashnikov drone — officially named the KUB-UAV — will likewise be simple to operate, effective and cheap, its manufacturers claim — and just as revolutionary. It will mark “a step toward a completely new form of combat,” said Sergey Chemezov, chairman of Russia’s state-owned Rostec arms manufacturer, which owns a controlling stake in Kalashnikov, according to Kalashnikov’s news statement on the launch.

     

    The KUB is four feet wide, can fly for 30 minutes at a speed of 80 mph and carries six pounds of explosives, the news release says. That makes it roughly the size of a coffee table that can be guided to explode on a target 40 miles away — the equivalent of a “small, slow and presumably inexpensive cruise missile,” according to a report by the National Interest website.

    […]

    Suicide drones are not new. The Islamic State pioneered the art of attaching explosives to commercially available drones and detonating them on advancing troops and enemy bases during the battles for the cities of Mosul and Raqqa in Iraq and Syria.

     

    Russian troops in Syria were targeted by the biggest-ever suicide drone assault in Syria last year, when a swarm of more than a dozen crudely assembled devices incorporating explosives and GPS guidance systems descended onto Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Syria.

     

    The U.S. and Israeli militaries have incorporated suicide drones into their arsenals — but controls on the export of technology mean the devices aren’t shared outside a small circle of close allies.

    The KUB drone will be faster and more accurate, and will deliver twice the explosive charge and have a greater range than any of the crude homemade devices that have been patched together by terrorists, according to the Kalashnikov representatives at the exhibition.

     

    And unlike U.S. and Israeli exploding drones, the KUB will be “very cheap,” said one of the Kalashnikov representatives. He declined to name the price and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to communicate with the media.

     

    The target market will be “smaller armies” around the world, he said, meaning the availability of the KUB will bypass controls imposed by the United States and its allies that are designed to keep weaponized drones out of the hands of their foes.

    [wapo article continued which included video I posted in next comment]

  16. Support the right to keep and bear exploding drones !- UNEDA (United National Exploding Drone Association)

  17. Exploding drones don’t kill people; people kill people.

    If you outlaw exploding drones, only outlaws will have exploding drones.

    They’ll have to pry my exploding drone from your cold dead charred hands.

  18. Up next, dirty drones that spread anthrax or powdered plutonium.

    Coming soon to a terrorist operation near you !

  19. Mr Jack, I believe you are a little too pessimistic. There is no law or Justice Department regulation that prevents the prosecution of a president, only a bad habit. However, I admit that pessimists are rarely disappointed.

    Also, your comment about AOC and microphones made my day. I smiled so wide my tonsils took a sunbath. That woman is making the absolute most of being photogenic & having eyes the size of pie plates. The practical question is, does she tarnish the Dems with her socialism, or does she make socialism seem sexy to middle America ?

  20. X-R,   let’s hard sell and call it U-NEED-A  (United National emotionally Exploding Drone Association)

  22. I am not surprised unskilled laborers are expolited in NEPA, heddy, considering how hard it is to find steady work, up there.  Did you hear the economy is booming?  Not in NEPA!  You should call Talkback16, maybe they’ll put something on da news about it since Amazon is a hot-topic, at the moment.  Thanks for sharing.

    Thanks, Jack.  I honestly hate giving scum Republicans talking points, but fortunately there aren’t many here to adopt them.

  23. Jamie . we miss you, it is Oscar weekend and nobody to give us our  fix.

    Mean while we will make do From the NYT:

    This crazy, mixed-up Oscar season comes to a close with Sunday night’s ceremony, which will forgo a host and, after plenty of controversy, still present all 24 categories on the air. But which movie is poised to win the biggest race of them all and take the Oscar for best picture?
    Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white art film “Roma” is a critical favorite that took the top trophy from the Directors Guild of America, but a foreign-language film has never won best picture, let alone one distributed by the insurgent streaming service Netflix. Many Oscar voters love the racial-issues dramedy “Green Book,” which was given top honors by the oft-predictive Producers Guild of America, but the film couldn’t even nab a best-director nomination.

    Read more here
    Jack
     

  24. Bink

    from the crap showing up on my twitter feed the Republicans already know, in fact they seem very eager to make AOC and socialism the face of the Democratic party.

    Jack

     

  25. KGC

    I guess dad doesn’t consider his daughter Jamaican enough to crack on that side of the family. lol families

    Jack

  27. Yeah, Jack, i’m somewhat upset with this leftward-shift in the Liberal discourse.  Instead of focusing on meat-and-potatoes issues like corruption, inflation, and job-creation, mainstream candidates are putting topics like “reparations” and “green new deal” in the headlines.  Ugh, i guess i’ll just get used to licking Republican bootheels.

    RZA and Kendrick Lamar had better win best song- the music in “Star Is Born” is terrible.  Decent movie, though, if you enjoy wallowing in depression.

  28. I’ve only watched one nominated film, “A Star Is Born”; i was kind of bored with “Black Panther” and never finished it.  Haven’t seen “Green Book”, but if Viggo Mortensen is in it, it must be good!

  29. wapo’s  pictorial personae dramatis

     

    Drawing to a close

     

    An illustrated guide to the many, many people in the Russia investigation’s orbit

     

    Vladimir Putin

     

    President of Russia

     

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